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Swashbuckling Sandy Mactaggart remade Edmonton in his own image

Edmonton developer, philanthropist Sandy Mactaggart reshaped our city | Edmonton Journal
"He was city-building. He wanted to make this a better place."

PAULA SIMONS, EDMONTON JOURNAL
Updated: April 6, 2018

“He was a yachtsman. A pilot. A hot air balloonist. A competitive race-car driver. A poet.

He was, with his wife CÚcile, a discriminating collector of Chinese antiquities.

He was co-founder of the Citadel Theatre and the Edmonton Art Gallery.

He served as chancellor of the University of Alberta, and, for a time, as chair of the university’s board of governors.

He was one of Edmonton’s most generous philanthropists.

And he was a developer and entrepreneur, a city builder, both literal and metaphoric.

He was Sandy Mactaggart. And his death this week, at the age of 89, should be an occasion for us to reflect on how different Edmonton might have been if he had not adopted this city and made it his home.

“He was a visionary leader and an ingenious entrepreneur,” said David Turpin, president of the University of Alberta. “He was urbane, in the best sense of the word. But he was also down to earth. Every time you met him, he just oozed warmth.”

Over the years, said Turpin, Sandy and CÚcile made donations to the university worth more than $65 million. But Mactaggart, he said, was as canny a donor as he was an investor, and used his donations to leverage millions more in matching dollars from other levels of government, making his gifts to the U of A worth more than $100 million.
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